GoKawiilMeta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform
from the regulate-me-daddy dept
By now you’ve almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta’s platforms. The headlines are all covering the basics: the years-long case these states filed against Meta ends, and Meta pays somewhere between $12.7 billion and $18 billion, depending on which document you read (the consent judgment itself caps the total at $16,680,647,753.21; Meta’s press release rounds it up to “approximately $18 billion”). Also Meta will implement a bunch of changes to its platforms with the aim of improving child safety on those platforms. It will also “encourage” YouTube and TikTok to enable the same safety features even though (bizarrely), if YouTube and TikTok follow suit, then Meta will have to pay more.
You can read the details of the proposed settlement here.
Notably, the whole point of doing this as a “settlement” is that everyone involved knows full well that no government could mandate these feature changes without violating the First Amendment. But now that it’s in a “settlement” the courts may need to explore if these choices — which Meta could make freely on its own — suddenly have become a “state action,” implicating the First Amendment.
As with the various rulings against Meta over the last few months, people are cheering this on, without realizing the damage it will do. We’ll explore why this is problematic in a moment, but just to highlight that I’m not alone in thinking so, both EFF and Fight for the Future are warning how bad this settlement is. Here’s EFF:
Under this settlement , young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta’s harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users’ privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests. And the data minimization and security measures don’t keep states from using data collected under the agreement for other law enforcement purposes – which could include things like criminal investigations of abortions or gender-affirming care.
And here’s Fight’s emailed statement:
Big Tech does pose harm to our kids through its business practices and exploitation, but pushing for more censorship, age-gating, and surveillance of young people at the hands of the same Big Tech companies that have already harmed young people is not the answer. Online ID checks when implemented put vital information behind age-gates, stamp down teenagers’ right to speak, and expose all of us to even more of our data being collected, hacked, and leaked. Meta knows that managing this amount of personal information and enforcing these agegates will be messy and that’s why they are seeking to offload the burden to anyone but themselves, while being seen to comply by the public and lawmakers. Instead of actually damaging their exploitative business model, this result allows Meta to bring everyone else down with them, from app stores to other social media companies. We feared that these lawsuits would manufacture consent for invasive age verification and content controls and our fears have been proven correct. We will continue to oppose online ID checks everywhere and be on the watch for more censorship creeping into Meta’s platform.
We’ll get into the specifics of why this settlement is so bad, but first some important background. For a few decades now, when basically all Attorneys General would get together to threaten and/or sue tech companies, it was almost always over bullshit headline grabbing claims where the AGs either had no jurisdiction or ability to legally do anything. Sixteen years ago, we wrote one story about an account written by a CEO of a company who faced down dozens of state AGs who were way more concerned about the headlines they generated than actually making platforms safe.
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